I quite often have a lot of questions about the working parts of television shows (which I suppose is a big part of why I’m an Entertainment Writer for a living).
One popular television show format is the quiz show – and I love that you can play along at home!
Recently, I was watching The Chase Australia (getting only about 10% of correct answers – it is what it is) when I started to think – how on earth do they come up with all of these questions?!
It was then my new mission to find someone who had worked behind the scenes for the show so I could ask the questions about the questions – and I have learnt a LOT.
Question Assistant Producer James Stirling Wilson worked on the last two seasons (14 and 15) of The Chase Australia, and reveals that question writing is not as simple as you may think.
In fact, I’ve been told it’s actually quite difficult!
“Many people say, ‘it must be easy to come up with loads of questions’. Not true – really not true,” he reveals.
And – it’s not just the coming up with the questions part that’s hard – they also have to be written for speaking, as the questions are read out loud.
“It’s not uncommon that people will write funny jokes that are really funny but are only funny written and not out loud – sometimes things don’t rhyme the same way as they do written!” he says.
James tells me that each question goes through a process, referring to it as the “journey of a question”.
“There are different stages that a question can be that go from ‘new’, to ‘accepted’, ‘verified’, ‘ready’, ‘used’, and then ‘verified read’,” he says.
In terms of who puts in the hard work and comes up with them, James says there are about 10 or 15 writers and “all they do is write questions”.
“No one focuses specifically on the first round, the cash builders, or the final chase questions, as everybody writes everything,” he reveals.
James says the team prepares 160 questions per episode – that’s 40 per week per writer.
“We wouldn’t get through all 160 in an episode because we prepared more questions than we needed for very obvious reasons – such as if something goes wrong and we suddenly need extra, we’ve got a bunch more that we didn’t use,” he says.
James explains that after being written, all questions get sent to a verification team where every single one is thoroughly checked.
“Every question has to come with verification links, sources to where it came from. Usually those sources are really reliable places like, Sydney Morning Herald, New York Times, Encyclopedia Britannica, the BBC, those kind of places where it’s just if they publish something, it has to be correct,” he says, adding “every question has to properly go through loads of levels of scrutiny because they have to be legally correct in a court of law.”
Once a question was verified, it then landed on James’ desk.
“In my role, I would’ve seen a question verified as it’s checked to be correct or correct enough at this stage. Then I would do an extra pass on it. So, I wasn’t checking to see if it’s correct, even though there are many times that a question had gotten to me and I would say, this is not correct for this amount of reasons,” he reveals, adding that he had to keep an eye out for repeat topics.
“I’ve seen loads of questions about topics like Disney films or Japan, or about mythology – where we had loads of the same type – and I’d still put it through and list it as a question that’s ‘ready’, but I’d put a note next to it and keep it as a reserve,” he says.
James adds that if questions are deemed difficult, they’re usually made to be a multiple choice question as “it gives people options to see with their eyes”.
“Sometimes when you see a problem, it becomes easier when you can visualise it,” he says.
Catch The Chase Australia on Seven and 7plus.
